Tragedy thrusts Nikki Haley into National Spotlight

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called the shooting spree inside a Charleston church a hate crime and said Friday that the accused gunman should face the death penalty.

“This is an absolute hate crime, ” Haley, a Republican, said in an interview Friday with the “Today” show. “And when I’ve been talking with investigators as we’ve been going through the interviews, they said they looked pure evil in the eye yesterday. Without question this is hate.”

Haley spoke a day after authorities named Dylan Roof as their suspect and arrested him for the horrific killings inside the historic Emanuel AME Church.

Police said Roof was in the church for an hour before killing nine people, including a pastor and state senator, a library manager and an 87-year-old grandmother. Law enforcement officials said he fired the fatal shots at close range, rather than randomly spraying gunfire across a room, and also said he stopped to reload several times.

“We absolutely will want him to have the death penalty,” Haley said Friday morning. “This is the worst hate that I’ve seen and that the country has seen in a long time.”

South Carolina has the death penalty and carries out executions by lethal injection, though the state has not put an inmate to death since 2011. State law says that prosecutors can seek the death penalty if there are certain “aggravating circumstances” in the case.